SLOW EMOTION

Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten / Royal Academy of Art - Den Haag / The HagueStudium Generale, May 4th, 2010

AWESUBLIME&BEAUTIFUL

Jacques TourneurI Walked With A Zombie

1943

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8PUsose3kE

4Jacques Tourneur- I Walked With A Zombie, 1943

Edmund Burke1729-1797

A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRYINTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS

OF

THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFULWITH SEVERAL OTHER ADDITIONS

Edmund Burke1757

Part II, Sect. I: Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.

Because I know that time is always timeAnd place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one timeAnd only for one place

T.S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday

Chris MarkerLa Jetée, ciné-roman

1962

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz5cs_la-jetee-1962_creation

Chris Marker - La Jetée, 1962

Sequoia AD 590-1891 - American Museum for Natural History, New York City

Part II, Sect. VII - Vastness

(...) as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise: when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small, and yet organized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense; when we push our discoveries yet downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense; we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself. For division must be infinite as well as addition; because the idea of a perfect unity can no more be arrived at, than that of a complete whole, to which nothing may be added.

Charles & Ray EamesPowers of Ten, 1977

A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universeand the effect of adding another zero

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGAEru1AJb0

SLOW EMOTION

collective emotion

Ise Shrine / Ise Jingû伊勢神宮AD 685 ->

Part II, Sect. I: Magnitude in Building

To the sublime in building, greatness of dimension seems requisite; for on a few parts, and those small, the imagination cannot rise to any idea of infinity. No greatness in the manner can effectually compensate for the want of proper dimensions. There is no danger of drawing men into extravagant designs by this rule; it carries its own caution along with it. Because too great a length in buildings destroys the purpose of greatness, which it was intended to promote.

Ise Shrine (685->), gate, of torii

18Ise Shrine (685->), plan

19Ise Shrine (685->), double plot

20Ise Shrine (685->)

21Ise Shrine (685->)

22

the clock of the long nowa.k.a.

The 10,000 Year Clock

The Long Now Foundation

23

ANTICIPATORYDESIGNSCIENCE

Olaf Stapledon - Manuscript timeline for his novel Last and First Men, A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930)

26

27

torsionalpendulum

binarymechanicalcomputer

normalclock dial

main dial

*5 digit year

*horizons

*sun, moon

*stars

equationof time cam

not shown:

drive rewind spiralsspeed governor

drive weghts

28Clock of the Long Now - Time Equation Scan Component

We will describe what we currently hope to be the experience of the full-size Clock/Library complex.You exit your vehicle in a parking area at the base of a mountain somewhere in the high desert of theSouthwest United States. Looking up, you see a flight of shallow steps, each step carved from a layer

of rock representing approximately 10,000 years of geologic time. After climbing 100 of these steps, or one million years into the future, you are somewhat awed and belittled by the greatness of geologic time.

You arrive at a flat knoll where you see a cave ahead.Through the opening of the cave you see some large but slow movement. You proceed and gradually make out a giant pendulum swinging back and forth deep within the cave. Once you reach the center

you realize that you are actually within the clock mechanism itself and you are aware of the pendulumbeating out its 10-second period. You proceed up a spiral staircase that will take you through the

relatively low ceiling and up into the first layer of clock mechanics. On this layer you see the fastestof the mechanical calculation devices, which ticks once per day. As you go up flight after flight yousee each progressive mechanism with its relative slower tick, the last being the precession of the

equinoxes, a 25,784-year cycle. The next few layers are the abstraction layers that adjust solar timeto actual time and the delay for the pendulum-impulsing mechanism.

When you reach the top of the stairs you are in a huge room several stories tall.

It is dimly lit from a slot cut through the living rock of the mountain on the southern face.You make out two giant helices, one descending either wall, each being rotated by a falling weight that must weigh several tons. Then you are surprised by an immediate brightness in the room. It is coming

from the sun that has become directly in line with the slit on the wall. It is reflecting off a hemispherical mirror lighting up the whole room and heating up a sphere in the center of a great dial.

The heating of this sphere actuates a synchronization mechanism which automatically adjusts the timeof the clock to local noon. You are able to make out the dial around this sphere, now showing you theyear 11,567. You then look at the rings in from this to find images you recognize of the Sun and Moonin their current phases, as well as a diagramof the current night sky. From these you are able to work

backward the actual time to your newer an more familiar time scale. But you are struck that the peopleof this ancient time had the foresight to think this far into their future and create this place.

At this point you wander through the rest of this facility to find a library and people accessing andpreserving the data stored there. Akin to the truly ancient library of Alexandria, there is a constant

forward migration of the data to increasingly better and denser methods of storage. In the main vaultyou find the original 1,000 books stored at the impossibly large scale of 100 NM pixels. These were the

first 1,000 books stored in the Clock/Library chosen by its founders. although not necessarily relevant to your time, what they began helped to teach people the value of knowledge over long periods of time.

Without it humanity might have obsolesced itself out of existence without being able to look over the ancient

records of the sea and air and find trends that are only apparent over centuries or millennia.

The heating of this sphere actuates a synchronization mechanism which automatically adjusts the timeof the clock to local noon. You are able to make out the dial around this sphere, now showing you theyear 11,567. You then look at the rings in from this to find images you recognize of the Sun and Moonin their current phases, as well as a diagram of the current night sky. From these you are able to workbackward the actual time to your newer an more familiar time scale. But you are struck the the people

of this ancient time had the foresight to think this far into their future and create this place.

32Mount Washington, Eastern Nevada

Part IV, Sect. XI: The Artificial Infinite

We have observed, that a species of greatness arises from the artificial infinite; and that this infinite consists in an uniform succession of great parts: we observed, too, that the same uniform succession had a like power in sounds. But because the effects of many things are clearer in one of the senses than in another, and that all the senses bear analogy to and illustrate one another, I shall begin with this power in sounds, as the cause of the sublimity from succession is rather more obvious in the sense of hearing. And I shall here, once for all, observe, that an investigation of the natural and mechanical causes of our passions, besides the curiosity of the subject, gives, if they are discovered, a double strength and lustre to any rules we deliver on such matters.

Brian EnoJANUARY 07003

Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now

fin

w w w . s l i d e s h a r e . n e t / r v t i e n h o v e n